


new omens

by qqueenofhades



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: British Comedy, Did We Really Expect Anything Else, Footnotes, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Lunch Dates, M/M, Mutual Pining, Some Other Things Do However, Talks About Feelings Don't Really Occur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-02 02:58:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19190551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qqueenofhades/pseuds/qqueenofhades





	new omens

It was a sunny morning in London, which in itself was a minor miracle. It is a little-known fact about life in Great Britain that when the weather threatens to get too fine on an inopportune occasion, such as a summer bank holiday or other event that the public has been really looking forward to, there is a squadron of highly trained operatives emplaced in a top-secret bunker under Downing Street to deal with the situation. They make a few telephone calls, they send important documents to be stamped with important stamps, and the end result is that no matter what the weatherman on the telly has hopefully predicted, the day will be grey and eleven degrees Celsius[1] with a strong chance of rain, light; rain, moderate; or rain, heavy. This is done to give the British people something to talk about, and to make them feel proud of the sacrifice of living in Britain. Moral fibre enters into it somewhere. We think, at any rate.

This day, however, was really spiffing, the result of a weather operator named Rodney Garrigan falling asleep on the switchboard rather than ringing the blokes who worked the satellites which were supposed to prevent this un-English nonsense, and the angel Aziraphale was regarding it wistfully through the windows of the bookshop. For possibly the first time in known history, he was less content in here than he might be out there, and that was a very odd feeling. Specifically, he would be happier out there in a social capacity with his Demonic Adversary of many millennia, who had promised to pop by for lunch. They were doing rather a lot of that these days. Lunch. And sometimes even supper. Upon one memorable occasion, there had even been an evening out on the West End.[2] It was one of the more pleasant outcomes of having saved the world from the apocalypse, it could not be denied. But still Aziraphale found himself in something of a quandary. It was very nice[3] indeed, and _yet._ It was something _else_ as well, and he, a vastly learned celestial being of an intensely literary persuasion, was all the more vexed for being unable to put a feather on it.

He turned away and opened the shutters. He sat down in pleasant expectation of customers. Despite all his previous attempts to avoid selling books at any cost, he had discovered that it was rather fun to do so, and sometimes even took the initiative. Besides, it might while away some time until lunch. (Not that Aziraphale’s entire morning had been dedicated to choosing a jacket and bowtie in perfectly complementing shades of ivory for the occasion, and not that he had emptied his entire closet repeatedly in search of this effect. Not in the least.)

The door jangled. Aziraphale looked up hopefully in case his Demonic Adversary was early.

The customer wanted to know where the Primark was. Aziraphale told her it was two shakes of a lamb’s tail, just down the street and to the right, can’t miss it.

The second customer wanted to know if they had got the newest Katie Price autobiography, and was put out when Aziraphale had not the foggiest what that was.[4]

The third customer wondered if it was all right if he could just nip to the loo.

The fourth customer spilled his takeaway coffee on a valuable first edition, instantly confirming Aziraphale’s lingering suspicions about the inadvisability of engaging with the hoi polloi in any capacity, and seemed deeply affronted when expected to pay for it. Aziraphale was not much good with arguments, or indeed rude people, and was just on the brink of backing down and letting the coffee-spilling numskull go about his property-destroying way, when the bell rang again.

‘One minute,’ the angel said, rather despairingly. ‘I’ve just got this – ’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said the Demonic Adversary here to take him out to lunch. He sounded quite unsurprised. ‘Of course you have.’

Aziraphale’s heart performed the customary happy leap it had done for over six thousand years, and which he thought perhaps it might get bored of after a while, but it hadn’t yet. He turned round to see A.J. Crowley performing one of his many varieties of stylish lean upon the front table and eyeing the coffee-spilling customer with an expression that could only be described as malevolent. He _was_ a demon, after all. Wouldn’t do to not be demonic. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, before turning to the current source of Aziraphale’s aggravation and cocking an expectant eyebrow. ‘You _were_ going to pay for that, weren’t you?’

The coffee-spilling numskull seemed confused by the advent of a second opponent. ‘I don’t see why I’ve got to.’

Aziraphale pondered if this sort of thing was why they had ended up with Brexit.[5]

‘It’s all right,’ he said aloud. ‘I’ll just – ’

Crowley shot him the sort of tolerantly exasperated look common to a man who spends his time finishing the fights that his other half inadvertently started. He then turned to the recalcitrant customer, removed his glasses, and did something alarming with his eyes. Five minutes later, the man had made a prompt payment of fifty pounds in cash, repented all his sins, and was thinking of calling his mum and going to that Sunday service at St Swindlewood’s that she kept badgering him about. He was also thinking he should give quite a bit to Oxfam or Comic Relief or some other such charitable organisation.[6]

‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Aziraphale said, as they watched the man run down the street as if his trousers were on fire.[7] ‘I could – I could have just miracled it back.’

Crowley raised the other eyebrow. He reached down and picked up the book, now indeed without a coffee stain to be seen anywhere, then handed it back. ‘Already did.’

Aziraphale blinked. ‘Then you – ’

‘I saw an opportunity and I seized it.’ Crowley put back on his glasses and performed that one-shouldered shrug of his. ‘Turned out as a win for your lot anyway, doesn’t it?’

He said this by habit, and not out of any conviction on their parts that such things really mattered, or that either of their respective Head Offices would chalk up the result of this. The truth, of course, was that Crowley could not resist an opportunity to lightly punish anyone who had caused Aziraphale a moment of discomfort or distress, as well as striking a principled blow for any one who has had to suffer at the hands of the retail public anywhere. A small wave of low-level vindication was briefly felt among countless latte-slingers, clothing-store cashiers, pub owners, train-station attendants, Underground drivers, and the employees of London’s only fast-food establishment, Pret a Manger. So really, you see, it was an act of Good after all.

‘We could pop out for a stroll,’ Crowley suggested. ‘Before lunch, if you like.’

Aziraphale struggled not to look as if he had been hoping to be asked this since his morning of intense preoccupation over the colour of his bowtie. ‘Oh,’ he waffled. ‘Perhaps I should – ‘

Crowley gave him another look, this of a man who knows bloody well that this was exactly what Aziraphale wanted, and would nonetheless need some prodding to do. He waited whilst Aziraphale fussed about the shop, closed the till, and got the keys to lock up. He did not actually need them, but he did like the officiousness of doing it. They stepped out into Soho, and he placed them into his jacket pocket. Then they set off down the sidewalk.

‘What’s it today?’ Crowley asked, as they reached an intersection where a number of well-dressed people were ignoring the lights instructing them not to presently cross a large and heavily trafficked street. ‘New place on Tottenham Court Road I thought we’d try.’

Once more he said this when it was not precisely what he meant, and as if both of them were not starting to wonder about the actual nature of these now-regular lunch engagements. Perhaps that is inaccurate, as neither of them were _wondering_ so much as they were not entirely certain what they were supposed to say about it. Aziraphale had told Crowley in 1967 that he went too fast for him, which Crowley had correctly interpreted as a reference not only to the speed of his driving. Even after saving the world and all that, the question of whether Heaven and Hell were in fact going to leave them be remained, as well as the fact that it is not very easy to break the habit of six thousand years of biting one’s tongue and taking it on the chin, like a proper British gent, even if strictly speaking they were neither of these things.[8] It was easier for things to be this way, rather than either of them to risk actually _saying_ something that might upset this pleasurable equilibrium.

‘That sounds lovely,’ Aziraphale said. ‘Jolly – jolly good. Ah – ah, Crowley?’

The Demonic Adversary glanced sidelong at him, almost shy. ‘Yeah?’

Aziraphale fumbled for a topic of general conversation. He had never lacked for things to say to Crowley before, and did not understand this odd, halting hesitance now. ‘Lovely weather we’re having today, isn’t it?’[9]

Crowley treated this feeble salvo with the magnificent contempt that it deserved. Which was to say, he clearly couldn’t think of anything better either. ‘Yeah.’

They walked almost a block in silence. An ill-mannered young man on a skateboard barged past them with a comment, not entirely under his breath, about the sort of people who blocked the way and what this said about their sexual orientation. Crowley raised a hand, but Aziraphale laid his own hand on his arm. With that, he made a small gesture. The young man fell off the skateboard and was subject to the immediate derision of a group of young women whose attention he would have otherwise hoped to attract. One of them decided that was it, she was definitely becoming a lesbian. Another reflected on the essential incompetence of all men and the deep-rooted problems of society and decided to run for Parliament.[10]

Crowley snorted. ‘Really, angel,’ he remarked. ‘Truly rebellious these days, aren’t you?’

Aziraphale was unsure how to answer that, chiefly because he had briefly been distracted by the first part. Crowley had called him ‘angel’ for six thousand years, as an obvious and slightly sarcastic statement of his divine nature, and Aziraphale had got used to it _that_ way. He himself didn’t go round calling Crowley ‘demon,’ just because it seemed rather rude, but recently he had started to feel that it might be meant in a different way. Different intonation, perhaps, or a slight inflection of meaning. Upon overhearing it on one occasion, a gentleman with gelled hair and an excessively tight pair of dungarees had invited them to a certain rainbow-coloured event in Brighton. Aziraphale had thought it was nice of him to attempt to improve their social life, if somewhat bewildered by his reason for asking.

He knew _what_ it was, strictly speaking. He was not entirely a benign and oblivious idiot, thank you very much. There had been that discreet gentleman’s club in Portland Place where he learned the gavotte, and the general experience of living in Soho. Aziraphale had been made aware of the wide spectrum of _preferences_ where humans were involved, but his conceptions of how it was in fact performed were wildly erroneous. Insofar as Aziraphale’s erotic sensibilities were shaped at all, they had been done by the rather bad sort of pulp literature written by repressed Victorians who couldn’t talk about scandalous things like ankles in public and poured their frustrations into excessively purple and flowery prose. (Which was to say, the creased-up book you find by accident in a box in your nan’s attic and later get in trouble with your mum for reading.) Aziraphale attempting to seduce anyone would have been a truly horrifying spectacle even for the hardened eyes of Hell.[11] He was of the confused impression that dewed alabaster skin and quivering rods of manly desire entered into it somewhere. Probing for more details might have resulted in irreversible psychological scarring for all concerned, and should be avoided.

And yet, despite all his confusion, Aziraphale was increasingly aware that he _might_ like to try something of the sort, and he had no notion how to begin. He thought it better to avoid embarrassment rather than get it wrong, and as he followed Crowley into the new place on Tottenham Court Road, he was even reduced to wondering if perhaps he should start somewhere else. It was not that Aziraphale had anyone else in mind, or even any desire to experiment, but it seemed easier to make the first round of mistakes on someone who mattered less. He did not want to foray into this sort of thing with no experience and then – ruining it with _Crowley_ would be something he could not bear at all.

Aziraphale briefly contemplated looking into something that the humans called – Kinder? Kindling? Timber? But as he still did not own a mobile, his understanding of how to properly utilise this fascinating invention was something well less than nil, and he would rather misplace several dozen Antichrists personally, rather than let on to Crowley that he was trying it. Besides, it seemed somewhat _unholy,_ if you got his drift. All that grinding, and frolicking, and canoodling, and prigging, and _rogering_. So unsanitary.

Aziraphale and Crowley ate lunch, as usual. The food was good, which gave them some conversational refuge apart from the weather. They caught each other looking out of the corner of their eyes and struggled to pretend they hadn’t. It was quite pitiable.

‘So,’ Crowley said, after a further ten minutes of struggle. ‘Heard anything from Tadfield?’

‘I – no, no, I haven’t.’ Aziraphale prodded at his veal cutlet with his fork. ‘I don’t suppose we will, now that – well, Adam Young isn’t the Antichrist any longer, so we _shouldn’t_ have to contend with a second Armageddon, I don’t think, lucky really after we bungled the first one, but one can never be entirely – ’

At this juncture, he caught a nearby diner looking at them strangely, and waved and smiled broadly. Crowley let out a small sigh and caused the diner to forget the previous thirty seconds of his life.[12] ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said, turning back. ‘And Head Office?’

‘No.’ That, perhaps, was what Aziraphale feared the most, in the slew of possibilities and hopes and other half-formed notions swirling about his poor bedazzled brain. There was the uncomfortably plausible chance that Upstairs would get wind of it somehow, if he was to accidentally wake up in bed with Crowley one morning, and this would cancel out any and all promises of non-interference. The prospect of the archangel Gabriel descending into one’s bedroom without warning and spotting one in the altogether, in intimate embrace with one’s supposed eternal enemy, was enough to chill one directly to the immortal bone.[13]

Crowley glanced up at him. It was potentially Aziraphale’s imagination that he seemed slightly relieved by this, if there had been more riding on the question.[14] ‘Nothing from Below either,’ he said succinctly. ‘If you were wondering.’

‘Ah,’ said Aziraphale, who had been wondering about this every waking moment for the last fortnight. ‘Oh – only a bit, I suppose.’

Once lunch had been finished (Crowley paid), they went out and turned down their usual route to St James’ Park. It was a bright Saturday and the paths were busy with strolling families and American tourists, one of whom wanted a picture with Crowley because he apparently resembled a famous film actor. Aziraphale found himself feeling a strange and unpleasant emotion as Crowley flung an arm around her shoulders and drew her close for the photograph. Once they had set off again, he said, ‘You don’t even _look_ like Daniel Tenant.’

‘You don’t know who that is,’ Crowley pointed out. ‘Actually, nobody does.’

Aziraphale struggled to think of something else to say. He was sure it was better not to confess his momentary urge to smite her with heavenly fire. He was an _angel,_ after all, and he did not use his powers for petty and vengeful purposes. He was the good one, or at least so he had always thought. Thwarter of wiles and denier of temptation, shining example of virtue, All That, So Forth & Etcetera. Except everything he wanted at the moment had nothing whatsoever to do with virtue and a great deal with temptation, and his eyes remained fixed on Crowley as he sauntered ahead with his usual insouciance.[15] The angel’s mouth was dry. Perhaps he had not drunk enough at lunch.

Realising that Aziraphale had fallen behind, Crowley stopped. He waited until his companion had caught up again, and they passed a pond where a duck was glancing round hopefully for the Russian Cultural Attaché.[16] There was a long pause. Then Crowley said, ‘You’ve been acting odd recently.’

‘Have I?’ Aziraphale fluttered, though in truth it was incredibly rich of Crowley to accuse anyone else of this at any time. ‘I just – terribly sorry – loads on my mind, you know. Averting the Apocalypse and all that, what ho, old boy.’

Crowley, knowing that Aziraphale spoke more like a Victorian dandy the more flustered he got, declined to offer him a helping hand out of the conversational morass. Not that Crowley would ever admit to feeling such a way – standards to maintain and all – but he had been a little hurt by Aziraphale’s apparent and inexplicable standoffishness. Part of his determined effort to organise more luncheons was because he had the suspicion that Aziraphale would deliberately wall himself up with books otherwise, and that seemed rather a step back after saving the world together. Of course, it was largely their fault that the world had needed to be saved at all, but that was an unimportant detail, and with that bit out of the way, well. They had a future again. At least until humans got round to rubbishing the planet with no help from either Above or Below, which seemed altogether likely. And yet.

Unlike Aziraphale, Crowley was in no doubt whatever about what he felt and what he would like to do about it, and he even had some, if limited, practical experience to draw upon in prosecuting it.[17] To his vast and unending chagrin, Crowley was arse over teakettle in love with the blasted angel and possibly had been ever since Aziraphale put his wing over his head to shield him from the first rain in Eden. He had ignored or overlooked it to varying degrees in the following millennia, but never got rid of it entirely, considering it a minor character flaw like a mildly embarrassing skin complaint or tendency to shout at multi-millionaire footballers whose job the spectator is confident he would do far better.[18] But he was entirely sincere in his repeated offers for them to run off together to a neighbouring galaxy, even if he was rather less clear on what would then happen once they arrived. The business of actually living like an old married couple was one he had strongly considered, since they more or less did precisely that anyway. At the very least, he had no objections to it, in principle. It was just that, well, they were an angel and a demon. You couldn’t be sure what would happen. It might be like sticking a fork into a plug-socket.

Also unlike Aziraphale, Crowley was versed on the naughty things that humanity did with their bits from places apart from the dirty books your nan reads, especially since they had been so long threatened that they would go to hell if they did these things incorrectly.[19] But at the moment his attention was consumed by the filthy question of whether he should casually take hold of Aziraphale’s hand, which dangled in the temptingly near distance. He was frightened that if he did this, however, Aziraphale might run off like a startled fluffy bunny, or at least lose all higher brain function for some inconvenient period of time. Crowley had been successfully pining for all of eternity to date, and he wasn’t about to go and muck up a good pine with something rash like an unannounced hand-holding. He was to pining what Hastur and Ligur had been to lurking, and he was proud of this fact. Clearly it was _Aziraphale_ who would struggle to accept this. Clearly.

They came to a halt at the cross-walk that led across the Mall into Green Park. They knew this bit of London very well, as the Ritz was on the far side, and decided to continue on rather than return to whatever pressing business awaited them. Truth be told, they weren’t entirely sure what that was anymore. It seemed a bit pointless to go on with the worn old rigmarole of blessing and temptation, they no longer had the looming apocalypse to involve them, and whilst Aziraphale at least had the bookstore to occupy him, he found himself wondering what exactly Crowley was doing these days. Off leaning fashionably on things and slouching on benches and driving the restored Bentley at improbably high speeds on motorways, no doubt.[20] It seemed a fascinating life, perhaps. And yet.

The light turned and they went across. Aziraphale cleared his throat.

‘Er,’ he said. ‘Getting on well, then?’

Crowley shot him a guarded sidelong look. They passed the ice cream stand where they had been recently kidnapped by the forces of heaven and hell, and scanned the trees just in case. Nothing, which was fortunate. Switching bodies on the spot might have attracted the sort of attention that even they could not immediately miracle away. Instead, there was just the more familiar sight of a lot of people stood with apparent relish in a long queue. What exactly they were queueing for was uncertain, but by God they were committed to doing it.[21]

‘I suppose, yeah,’ Crowley said. ‘Getting on.’

They walked past a newsagent’s. Queen’s ‘Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy’ belted out from within. It was even on the line about dining at the Ritz. Unsurprisingly, but still exasperatingly, both angel and demon failed entirely to get the hint.

‘Look,’ Crowley said. ‘D’you want to come by my place this evening? We can…’ He fished vainly for something that made sense, but not too much of it. ‘We can… talk,’ he settled upon triumphantly. ‘About… plans.’

Aziraphale was alarmed. ‘Do we need a plan?’

Crowley considered.

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Do we?’

⁂

Aziraphale had been to Crowley’s flat before, but not _terribly_ often, as he was still obliged to pretend, before the world had gone and briefly ended several Saturdays ago, that they were enemies. He stood anxiously in the foyer, shifting from foot to foot and clutching a rather good bottle of wine, and felt slightly judged by the high-end doorperson that is to be found in these sort of establishments. He thought about blurting out that he was there to visit Mr Crowley, but he wasn’t sure if this would place him in the doorperson’s Good Book or not.[22]

The lift arrived, and Aziraphale got into it. He rode up to the top floor, got out, and proceeded cautiously to the door. Upon hearing no sound of a threatening nature, he knocked.

There was a shout from inside that seemed to indicate that Aziraphale should let himself in, so he did. Then he blinked. Crowley was wearing an apron, which gave Aziraphale a sudden flashback to their several years spent surrogate-parenting young Warlock Dowling, if that was what one wanted to call it, in the ineffable ways of good and evil.[23] The sight of Crowley dressed in drag as a stern Scottish nanny had awoken some strange and secret desires in Aziraphale, as if he too wished to be told to eat his vegetables and go to bed. He stared.

‘Ah, hello,’ he said lamely, having now done so a moment too long. ‘I’m here.’

Crowley uttered a grunt of acknowledgement and beckoned to the wine glasses on the counter. Aziraphale uncorked the bottle and poured them a healthy tipple apiece, afraid to spill anything just in case. The flat was much as he remembered it, with the hard-edged, spotless black surfaces, the shiny chrome trimmings, the appliances that looked too stylish to work, and all the other carefully cultivated trappings of an expensive London existence. There was also that statue, which Crowley evidently still did possess for reasons best known to himself. Purportedly it depicted Good and Evil wrestling, with Evil winning. It looked very much, however, as if wrestling was not _precisely_ what they were doing, and was not at all helped by the fact that they both resembled angels.[24] Aziraphale glanced at it, then hastily away. He thought it best to pretend that he had gone temporarily blind and could not see.

‘So, my dear,’ he said, in a rather transparent attempt to change the subject. ‘Shall I – shall I make myself useful? Stir a – stir a pot, or something?’

He really wasn’t sure what to do upon a purely social visit to Crowley’s. So far as he could think, the occasion had never actually arisen before. And while Aziraphale was a gourmand in every sense of the word and enjoyed every sort of delicacy that the human world could offer, he had very rarely made it for himself. It struck him that Crowley appeared to be actually trying to make supper, likely the first time the futuristic kitchen had been used for its designed purpose since the demon had moved in. He knew, of course, that Aziraphale was very fond of food, and this seemed to be – insofar as the angel could discern, which as we have established, _was_ limited – some sort of Gesture. Dare Aziraphale say it, and he did not, almost sweet.[25] This was all very odd.

In any event, Crowley declined the offer of assistance with a terse jerk of his head, so Aziraphale took one of the wine glasses and perched nervously on the edge of the uncomfortable sofa. He glanced round at the houseplants, which trembled slightly, and waited until Crowley had brought over the tray of supper, setting it down on the immaculate glass coffee-table. Aziraphale had wondered if it would be possible to eat anything that Crowley cooked, or if he had merely scorched it to within an inch of its life and called the job done, but it looked tasty. He rubbed his hands together and selected a bite. Apparently he could not keep the surprise off his face at the result.

Crowley laughed. ‘What were you expecting, angel?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘The roasted gore and offal of spitted sinners? Know that’s not really my bit, me.’

‘No, no, it’s delicious, my dear, delicious.’ Aziraphale patted fastidiously at his mouth with the serviette. ‘I was just never aware that you could – that you could _cook.’_

Crowley shrugged, as if to say it was no different from any other human activity that one could master if one put one’s mind to it. Then he said, somewhat more roughly, ‘Seems there’s a lot of things you _aren’t aware_ of.’

Aziraphale wondered if this was a trap. ‘You said we should discuss plans,’ he said lamely, noting that Crowley’s own glass of wine was untouched. Perhaps he hadn’t got the right vintage. Perhaps after Crowley had gone to all this trouble to make something _he_ would like, he had altogether muffed doing the same. ‘I suppose we _could_ in fact go back to, you know. The old hat. Or if you still had planned on Alpha Centauri, well – ”

Let us conveniently pause here to note that absolutely every word of this, unbefitting though it might be for Aziraphale’s somewhat-tarnished angelic status, was a lie, or at least not what Aziraphale actually thought that Crowley wanted at all. Back in Tadfield, whilst they were waiting for the bus to drive them to London, Aziraphale had performed a surreptitious experiment. This experiment had consisted of pretending that he had forgot that his bookshop, his pride and joy since the year 1800, had burnt to the ground. Of course Aziraphale had forgotten no such thing, but he wanted to see if Crowley would still invite him to stay, which then Crowley had immediately done. Aziraphale had fobbed it off with some excuse about how his side wouldn’t like that very much, but he thought that if he did it again, or acted as if he might want Crowley to leave, then they could properly get somewhere about what the blasted demon actually wanted. Of course, this would have all been far easier if Aziraphale had in fact just gone and asked what Crowley wanted, but neither of them believed in doing such ridiculous things.

In the next moment, however, he almost had cause to regret doing so, as Crowley’s eyes burned a hard, flat yellow, the slits of his pupils going dead black. ‘I don’t want – ’ He got to his feet so fast that the air around him performed a small sulfuric flicker. ‘How the _heaven_ are you so stupid, angel? I don’t want to go to Alpha Centauri! Do you think I stopped the apocalypse because I wanted to go out to space, fa-la- _bloody-_ la, and live by myself on some stupid burning star in the middle of bleeding nowhere! You absolute – you complete – ’

Aziraphale cringed. He had asked for this, after all, and he braced himself for a scathing curse in one of the thousand tongues of hell. Something truly terrible, unspoken for centuries except by the chap who had cursed tumble-dryers so that one sock always got lost, or so that the wanker ahead of you in the coffee-queue when you were already massively late for work took eight hundred years to order their bloody frou-frou beverage. He waited, trembling like one of Crowley’s houseplants, for the hammer to fall.[26]

‘You total – ’ Crowley breathed heavily. ‘You utter – ’

There was a brief and deeply ominous silence.

 _‘Nincompoop,’_ Crowley concluded, looking even more furious. If he was swearing like Aziraphale, you knew things were bad. ‘Yes. You _nincompoop.’_

‘Ah. Yes. Yes, I suppose I am.’ The angel spread his plump hands appealingly. ‘But my dear fellow, if that – if that _isn’t –_ and if you asked me here, well, I thought – perhaps I thought – ’

Whatever Aziraphale had in fact thought, we can safely conclude that it was, as before, stupendously incorrect. But the fact that Crowley had asked him here and actually operated a cooker without incinerating it and tried to make him a lovely meal and everything else, only to then be confronted with the suggestion that it was a nice farewell party before he buggered off to four-point-three-seven light-years away, was the straw that snapped the Bactrian’s back. Crowley spun away on his heel with an enraged huff and looked set to shatter all the windows in the flat with the sheer force of unconstrained fury. Aziraphale was just getting to his feet in alarm, though for all he knew what he was going to do he should have remained exactly where he was, and had some furry notion of offering a word of comfort. But instead he ended up nose-to-nose with a very angry fallen angel, and Crowley grabbed at him, and Aziraphale grabbed back, and then, with more surprise than anyone had kissed anyone else in the entire history of the world, that was exactly what they did.[27]

There have been, in said history of the world, many hundreds of millions of kisses. Some of these have been perfect. Some have been at least acceptably lovely. Some have been middling-to-so-so, and plenty of them have been bloody awful. This kiss was absolutely none of these. This kiss was most comparable to a pair of tugboats that had accidentally got loose from their moorings and drifted toward each other in slow motion, whilst their respective captains realised that they were about to crash and panicked to an increasingly spectacular degree of madly twiddling all the knobs and buttons and fiddly bits that are essential to driving a boat and/or stopping it from crashing into other boats. Of course, none of this stopped the tugboats from crashing, any more than it stopped that one boat from hitting that big bit of ice that they made a film about, and no more did it stop the two celestial beings in question from a full-on snog. There was nothing halfway about the snog, never mind that it was an utter disaster of a snog and anyone who had ever snogged anyone before would have realised that at once. It was snogged as hard as anything has been snogged, and the snogging that happened was the sort of snog that can only be snogged when the snoggers in question have been waiting six sadly snogless millennia to snog their hearts out. They snogged until even for a pair of immortals, they were completely out of breath, reeling backward and gulping and emitting funny sounds like one of those rubber cushions that makes rude noises when you sit on it. Aziraphale was entirely too stunned to move. Crowley tried to wipe his mouth on the back of his hand, forgot what he was doing with it, and had a small aneurysm.

‘I do say,’ the angel said faintly, when he had got up enough wherewithal to speak, though indeed he was not sure he would ever do it properly again in his life, or anything else. ‘Was – was _that_ what the chap in the tight dungarees was going on about?’

Crowley looked blank, then exasperated. It was difficult to say whether this was at Aziraphale taking so long to figure it out, or at his use of the word ‘dungarees’. He wiped his mouth again, staring very determinedly at anything other than Aziraphale’s face. ‘Never could fool you, angel. Mind sharp as a butter knife, that’s you.’

Aziraphale blinked very hard. ‘They really were very tight,’ he persisted, in frantic search of any other recollections about the interaction that might explain the new and fascinating contours into which his entire world had just fallen. ‘Tighter even than yours, you know.’

‘You’re welcome to inspect his _tight dungarees,_ if you want,’ Crowley snapped. Finally snogging the shite out of your crush of six thousand years, only to have him immediately rabbit on about another man’s pants, was not the thing to put one, especially a demon, in the most tender and romantic of moods. ‘Go on, door’s that way. Go on!’

‘I – no, that’s not what I – not what I meant.’ Aziraphale rubbed his eyes, just in case he’d somehow dozed off and this was all a highly coloured dream. For better or worse, it appeared to be happening. Oh _dear._ ‘I just – Crowley, I – I just – I – I think I ought to sit down.’

Aziraphale did this, lucky that he was still close enough to the sofa that it was beneath him already, and made a restorative grab for his abandoned glass of wine. Crowley did the same, drank it all straight down without a breath, then reached for the open bottle and began polishing it off like vaguely bad-tasting but vital medicine. There were only a few droplets left in the bottom when he put it down, and the nasty silence made an even nastier reappearance. Then he said, ‘We don’t actually have to talk, you know.’

‘We don’t?’ Aziraphale glanced at him in consternation, but Crowley was still determined not to meet his eyes. ‘I thought that was why you asked me here?’

‘Satan!’ Crowley stared ferociously at the floor, in the same way one would raise their eyes to the ceiling when calling upon the Almighty for strength. Not that he remotely wanted Satan to faff in again, as everyone had had quite enough of that sort of thing back at the airbase, but still. ‘How can you – how can you _still not blessed get it, angel?!’_

Aziraphale calculated the sum total of their interactions in his head. Every single one, that was, and even for an angel possessed of divine intelligence, this took some moments. Then he looked up in shock. ‘You – you don’t. You can’t have. You – oh my giddy aunt. Since – ?’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ Crowley began to look round in obvious search of more alcohol, vanished into the kitchen, and returned with a bottle, which he began prying into like a starving squirrel with a particularly stubborn acorn. ‘It was – it was stupid of me.’

It struck Aziraphale dimly that Crowley thought he had made a terrible mistake, and that by the ill-judged and reckless snogging actions of just under two minutes, he had completely destroyed the sum total of over six thousand years to date. Timidly the angel scooted closer. ‘I – well, I was quite startled, yes,’ he said, which was obvious and not terribly helpful. ‘But you know – I – I suppose we – we might – ’

And with that, since Aziraphale could see no good of continuing to babble, and was correctly convinced he wouldn’t manage to say anything he actually wanted to, he – for once in his long life – took sudden and decisive action. He took firm hold of the bottle and whipped it out of Crowley’s startled hand, reached up, caught hold of his head, and pulled him down.

They snogged again. They got somewhat better at it on this go, so it was only dreadful instead of world-record-settingly disastrous. Neither of them had much notion of what proper snogging involved; Aziraphale seemed to think it should be wet, and Crowley seemed to think it should have a lot of biting. But they sorted it a bit more with every moment, and by the time they pulled apart, they had managed something that a teenage lad in the back of a motor down some country lane with a girl might have felt better about himself to witness. A delighted smile spread across Aziraphale’s face. ‘By Jove,’ he said, in the tone of a man who has just discovered two-for-one couponing at Sainsbury’s and is in true wonder that such a miracle exists in the modern world. ‘I think – I think I might be in love with you.’

Crowley groaned, throwing an arm over his face and falling back on the couch. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, please stop, you’re ruining it.’

Aziraphale blinked again, as it was his turn to worry that he had made a terrible mistake. He racked his brains for whether the vintage pornography had said anything about when you were supposed to make impassioned declarations about feelings. But he didn’t think it was the time to experiment. ‘Er,’ he said hastily, in search of a safer subject. ‘Supper. There’s still the lovely supper you cooked, my dear. We – yes. We could go on with that.’

‘You finish.’ Crowley stood up abruptly, doing that hip-swaying, snaky walk of his, too forced and too casual, blundering toward the door. ‘Good night, angel.’

And with that, before Aziraphale could do anything apart from sit and stare after him and feel something small and raw and tender in his chest, he went.

⁂

Crowley needed some blessed air.

He didn’t look back until he had made it to the car park and into the Bentley, which he drove down the alley and out into the road at eighty miles an hour. He switched on the stereo with shaking hands, thus for Freddie Mercury to inform him that he was going slightly mad. That, Crowley felt, was rather inconsiderate of his old friend Mr Mercury, as he himself was going far more than slightly mad and felt that his crisis ought to take priority just now. He only incidentally bothered to touch the steering wheel, since the car knew what it was supposed to do and he had more pressing things on his mind than driving. Satan Below, he couldn’t believe he had just done that, and then – of course Aziraphale was the sort of soppy bastard to blurt out that he loved someone after exactly one snog. Well, two, if you were being precise about it, but it still really only counted as one. And worse, Crowley had – well, he had _wanted_ Aziraphale to say it, but somehow _hearing_ it hadn’t been what he wanted at all. Did the bugger mean that he had only now ever entertained the thought of loving him, when Crowley had loved him since that thunderstorm in Eden? Or was it just the thought of him, the forbidden fruit, that Aziraphale loved, and not the fact of really, bloody _having_ it? It had been the same with Eve. Give them what they wanted, and everything went to pot. He’d _been_ there with the apple business. He _knew_ this.

Crowley felt vaguely guilty about racing out of London at top speed and leaving a confused Aziraphale in the lurch back at his flat, but not enough to stop. He turned onto the M40 and only belatedly realised that he was going to Oxfordshire when he passed the junction for Tetsworth – and then a few minutes later, Tadfield.[28] He made a snap decision, swung the Bentley across two lanes of traffic, nearly got pancaked by a speeding goods lorry, and once he was obliged to perform a miracle to stop the lorry driver having a heart attack and causing a really big pile-up, accelerated onto the slip road and down to the village.

R.P. Tyler, Neighbourhood Watch, was fortunately elsewhere making himself an interfering busybody in someone else’s business tonight, and Crowley proceeded through Tadfield uninterrupted by elderly twats in tweed. He still wasn’t sure where he was going – it seemed quite foolish to voluntarily seek out the Antichrist again, and now that Adam Young had rebooted reality into a world where he had never been the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Lord of the Black Pit, etc, it wasn’t as if much help could be had from that quarter. Instead, Crowley recognised where he was only when he almost crashed into the fence and an oddly familiar bicycle. Jasmine Cottage.

He stopped convincing the Bentley that it was running, and the engine died with a rumble. He leant back in the driver’s seat, running both hands through his hair until it stood up in wild ginger licks, and wondered what on earth he was actually planning to do. But he found himself oddly clinging onto the idea that somewhere in all her other prophecy tosh, Agnes Nutter might have had something to say about this, and seeking out someone else’s opinion, even that of a mad seventeenth-century Lancashire witch, on what had just happened with Aziraphale might be more useful than hashing through it himself. It was worth a try.

Crowley got out of the car and went up the cottage walk. He rang the bell, blessed himself for an idiot, and wondered if it was too late to run away, in the sort of prank favoured by bored schoolchildren everywhere. He could probably make it over the fence before they ever realised he was here, though the Bentley might be confusing. That, or –

Newton Pulsifer opened the door. He was wearing his underpants and a confused expression.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, goggling at Crowley. ‘Can I help – I mean, has something gone, you know. Wonky again. With reality?’

Crowley considered grimly that reality had gone very wonky indeed, but he wasn’t explaining that to a bespectacled berk from Dorking. ‘Is Anathema here?’

‘Er, yeah,’ Newt said, blushing in a way that suggested the lack of any other clothes apart from the underpants might relate to some activity from which they had been Interrupted. Oh, heaven. The whole world really was out to spite him, Anthony J. Crowley, personally. ‘Shall I go fetch her?’

Crowley made a gesture indicating that yes, obviously, dunderhead, and Newt scuttled off. Crowley sauntered in, heard a faint hiss from the horseshoe over the door, and was briefly tempted to rip the blasted thing off, but restrained. He sat down at the table, stood up again, debated whether to make himself tea or to see if Newt had inflicted some horrible craft beer on the premises, and had decided exactly nothing by the time Anathema Device appeared. She was somewhat more clothed, but no less confused. ‘You,’ she said. ‘We weren’t expecting you.’

Crowley wondered if that meant they weren’t expecting him per se, tonight of all the specific nights, or if they had not expected him at all. For someone who had grown up knowing the whole future like Anathema, that must be a shock to the system. He recalled that he had once hit the witch with his car and should probably attempt to be polite. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Good evening. Apologise for the late visit, all that.’

Anathema glanced round as if he might be hiding Aziraphale behind his admittedly-also-tight dungarees. ‘Where’s your – friend?’

The pause before _friend_ seemed to indicate that she was wondering if there was something else she should call him, which coincidentally was also what Crowley was wondering. ‘Not here,’ he said, in a darkly mysterious tone which could imply either that Aziraphale was inconveniently detained by having forgotten his ticket in the train station and thus trapped forevermore behind the ticket barriers, or that he had been ritually murdered by an occult brotherhood of vampire-slaying Knights Templar.[29] ‘Actually, I – I had a question. About…’ He gritted his teeth. Nothing for it. ‘Agnes Nutter.’

Anathema raised both eyebrows. With a pointed look, she instructed Newt to dismiss himself, and he obediently did so. Then she turned back. ‘What about Agnes Nutter?’

Her tone was not entirely warm. Perhaps she was tired of having her life dictated by the autocratic whims of one crazy ancestress, and did not welcome being dragged back into this particular quagmire now, but the two of them had (with various others) been party in saving the world, and that gave her some obligation to answer Crowley’s questions. She waited.

‘If she…’ Crowley waved a hand. ‘If she had… more prophecies.’

‘She did,’ Anathema said, after a moment. ‘A whole new book. A solicitor named Giles Baddicombe brought them by a few weeks ago.’

‘And?’

‘We burnt them.’ Anathema sat down at the table across from him, eyeing him with a mix of pity and confusion. Crowley had never been looked at like that by a woman, or indeed anyone, and found it distinctly dislikeable. ‘We decided we’d rather not know. Why?’

Crowley searched for a way to put this without saying anything about what had just happened. ‘I was – wondering if it might have said something about me and…’ He hesitated. He had a nasty feeling that Anathema was going to twig on regardless. ‘Well, about me.’

Anathema cocked her head, studying him. Then she beckoned for him to wait, got up, and disappeared round the corner. Some extended banging and rustling followed, until she returned with an old-looking strongbox. ‘Baddicombe brought this,’ she said. ‘It had the _Further Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter._ You’re welcome to look.’

Crowley regarded the box in some suspicion. Then he plunged his hand in as leerily as if it might contain a king cobra, though indeed a bite from a king cobra would have done nothing to him and the king cobra was the one who should have been worried about being bitten by Crowley. He rooted about, fumbled upon a bit of manky paper that was stuck to the very bottom, and pulled it out as if for a raffle prize-draw. He wasn’t sure what exactly, if anything, he expected it to be. Probably bloody nothing.

He opened it.

Agnes Nutter, it seemed, had been unusually blunt in this case. Foreseeing, as she had with all else, that a lovelorn demon would turn up to ask her several-times-great granddaughter for relationship advice, and that gentle admonishments and supportive words really just wouldn’t cut it. No, the only solution for this problem was a sledge-hammer.

 _Gette thy Heade out of thine Asse, Demon,_ the paper said. _Go ye back to London Town and do Somethinge Useful. The Angel lovest you and has known it since the Explosion with the Evil Gentilmenne who wanted my Booke for the Prussian Villain with the foolish little Moustache. Hasten directly in return and Grovel in plentifulle Measure. When that is done, ye may Shagge and ye mayest not, but For God’s Own Sake, Enough._

Crowley stared at the crabbed old handwriting. He could not help but feel personally attacked by the whole thing, though he _had_ come up here hoping to be told what to do. If it was true what Agnes was saying, Aziraphale had had _some_ idea since 1941 and that episode with the Nazis, which – well, it was better than only having the first glimmer of it post-snog. That was Aziraphale for you, several days late and many, many pounds short as ever. Crowley absorbed this news in both adoration and irritation, which in fact was his constant state of higher being. He adored Aziraphale and was vastly irritated about it. But Agnes had already warned them that they were playing with fire, which was why they had concocted their previous scheme in the first place. Crowley had trusted Aziraphale to take his body down to Hell and survive holy water, just as he had taken Aziraphale’s to Heaven to endure hellfire, and apparently Agnes felt that if they hadn’t understood everything after that, they would need one final kick square in the obstinate immortal behinds. Crowley couldn’t help being grudgingly impressed with the meddling old hag. She, at least, had definitely seen it coming.

Seeing that Anathema was watching him, Crowley decided it was best for all concerned for Agnes Nutter’s last prophecy to remain a closely guarded secret. He stuffed it quickly into his pocket. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right, I’ll – thanks very much. Sorry for that time you hit my car, of course. Hope all is – well, seems to be properly corking with Mr Pulsifer, so that worked out for everyone. Ta-ta, toodle-pip.’

With that, while Crowley was thinking that he had played it entirely cool and Anathema was in no doubt at all that the paper had informed the demon outright to get on with a good shag,[30] he ran out the door and into the car. He then sat there wondering if he was in fact going to go back to London and grovel as Agnes had instructed. Crowley, to say the least, did not grovel, mainly because he had spent six thousand years not giving a well-turned whatsit what anyone apart from Aziraphale thought of him. It was part of his demonic charm, and he said so himself, and it had always worked out before. That was the thing. Everything had always worked out _Before._ (At least, well, until it didn’t.) But this was different. This was _After._ A new world. And he still didn’t have any idea what to do with that.

After a long moment, Crowley groaned expressively, summoned the Bentley back to life, and reversed out from Jasmine Cottage with a crunch of gravel. It took him a while to find his way back to the motorway, since Tadfield had undergone the aforementioned rearranging, but he managed it eventually. He stared through the windscreen and tried to think what exactly he was supposed to do about this. It didn’t make any _sense._

Freddie Mercury, at least, had got over thinking that he was a banana tree. _Save me,_ he sang, as Crowley sped back toward London, even if not quite as fast as he had left it. _Save me, save me, I can’t face this world alone. Save me, save me, save me, I’m naked and I’m far from home._

That was true, Crowley thought. That had always been true. Bless it, _always,_ to a really frustrating degree. It had always been the two of them and he had long since lost any remote ability to imagine anything that wasn’t. It was like imagining himself without his wings, or his sunglasses, or his Bentley, or his suave charm that caused people to mistake him for famous film actor Daniel Tenant, or anything else of the bits that made _him._ Aziraphale had been there from the very first moment he slithered onto the stupid, marvellous planet, the other _half_ of him, and now that stupid, marvellous planet, even if rather less gleaming and new, was still _theirs._ Of course he didn’t want to go to Alpha Centauri. He was an utter wasteman, entirely possibly, but he had never left his angel alone. Not when he needed him. Not once. Not ever.

 _How I loved you, how I cried,_ Freddie Mercury put in helpfully. _The years of care and loyalty were nothing but a sham, it seems. The years belie, we lived a lie, I love you ‘til I die._

(Except, Crowley thought. Except they _weren’t_ a sham, or nothing had ever been real in the entire universe, not through all of time and space, and demon though he was, he found just now that even he was not quite that cynical.)

_Was it all wasted, all that love?_

Bloody heaven, Crowley. Pull yourself together, mate.

Pull yourself together.

⁂

It was late by the time Crowley finally got back to London, even having travelled to Oxfordshire and back at far above the posted speed limit, and the streets had gone more or less quiet.[31] Rather than heading back to his flat, he drove to Soho, actually doing it himself this time, and turned up before the bookshop already feeling like a prat. He supposed Aziraphale had gone home after the unceremonious end to the evening. Maybe he felt he’d dodged an infernal bullet. It was still possible. Anything was.

Crowley parked the Bentley on the kerb in front of a no-parking sign, got out, and walked to the door of the bookshop. It was closed, but the door opened when he pushed it. The bell rang in the darkness, and Crowley went inside, through the dim stacks, and to the stairs to the back, which led up into Aziraphale’s flat. ‘Oy, angel,’ he said, half under his breath, in the tone of someone not sure if he actually wants to be heard. ‘You here?’

He reached the top of the stairs, saw a light under the door, argued with himself one more time, and couldn’t see anything for it. He wondered whether to knock or just let himself in. It was good manners to knock, couldn’t have that, and yet. None of the old stupid rules really mattered, did they? And, after all, Agnes had informed him to Grovel in plentifulle Measure.

Crowley knocked.

The door opened.

Angel and demon stared at each other until one or other of them might have gratefully welcomed a second unsolicited exorcism to escape the awkwardness. But Shadwell was now off living in a bungalow in Chipping Norton with Madame Tracy and a cat named Bootles – not that far from where Crowley had been earlier that evening, in fact – and unavailable for the service. Aziraphale cleared his throat. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’ Crowley blew out a breath he didn’t precisely need. ‘Er – come in?’

Aziraphale stood aside to beckon him across the threshold, and Crowley stepped inside. Aziraphale’s flat was decorated as if someone had made it over in a very modish style for the year 1893 and failed to update it ever since, with lacy doilies, striped wallpaper, claw-footed furniture, a gramophone, a tall grandfather clock, and pink-cheeked china shepherdesses that stared ominously at Crowley out of their dead painted eyes. It in fact resembled some of the creepier bits of Hell, at least on the surface, but it didn’t feel like Hell at all. Aziraphale had lived here in all his fussy, prissy, hopelessly behind-the-times, distracted, bookish, gourmand glory for over two hundred years, and the place felt like _him._ It felt – more than Crowley’s own flat did, since he rarely lived there, and everyone knows that the thing in question is not really a place anyway – like _home._

They stared at each other a bit more. Big staring champions, them.

‘I’m – ’ Crowley had not planned on uttering these words, ever, but necessity called. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with only a minor choke. ‘Didn’t quite – you know. Might have minorly bolloxed it up just a tad earlier. Only a tad, though.’

‘Er,’ Aziraphale said. ‘Er, well.’

Just as God Herself was wondering as if the universe might end again before these two absolute cockwaffles got round to spitting _anything_ out, Aziraphale – who had also had time to do some thinking – decided to, as the dead poets liked to say, carpe the fucking diem. He reached out and took Crowley’s face in both hands, running a thumb along the snake tattoo by his right ear, and decided that further explanations, expostulations, and ejaculations[32] could wait for later. For the third time, but only the first when either of them had any idea what they were doing, the Angel of the Eastern Gate and the Serpent in the Garden actually had a good and entirely lovely kiss, and the people said Amen.

After a very long moment, Crowley pulled back. His eyes had turned from hard yellow to a soft gold like the heart of a warm fire, the kind you come in from the cold on a miserable winter’s day, and go to sit in front of with your cocoa and your book.[33] But he still had fierce hold of both of Aziraphale’s arms, and pulled him back in with a jerk, so their foreheads touched. ‘You’re mine, Angel,’ he said roughly, with just the hint of a snarl underlying the words. ‘You’re _mine,_ and neither Heaven nor Hell is _ever_ going to take you away from me again. Not unless you – ’

At this point Aziraphale cut him off rather emphatically, and they got distracted again for several moments, before staggering dazedly down the hallway in the direction of the bedroom. Nobody would ever have described this place as conducive to scorching romance, except for possibly Madame Tracy, but presently neither of them were paying much attention to the furnishings. Aziraphale had hold of the stupid little scarf that Crowley liked to wear, and Crowley had torn the bowtie Aziraphale had taken such care in selecting that morning past repair. They had barely let go of each other or come up for air long enough to do much else, and Crowley had some muddled notion that he once more might be going too fast. He pulled back in concern. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Are you sure we should – ’

Aziraphale uttered what he fondly fancied was a sexy growl. This deeply disconcerted both of them and was subsequently never spoken of again.

Unfortunately, this is not the kind of book with salacious details, so if you want that sort of thing, you’ll have to pay a visit to your nan and find an excuse to go up to the attic.[34] Suffice it to say, however, that all sorts of things were learnt on both ends, Aziraphale turned out to be unexpectedly kinky, Crowley swore in at least four hundred and thirty-six of the thousand tongues of hell and likely caused some permanent demonic aura to settle into the place,[35] and Aziraphale really did not mind at all. They wound up tangled in the sheets with things thrown across the room, Aziraphale absently stroking the sleek black feathers of the wing that had landed on his face and Crowley’s arm crooked behind his head. They stared at the ceiling. It must be said that both of them were more-than-somewhat expecting a cadre of enraged angels to break through. Someone dropped something next door and they jumped a foot.

‘Oh, my,’ Aziraphale said, still breathing hard. ‘Oh _my.’_

Crowley turned his head on the pillow to regard him with an ironic smile. ‘That bad, I hope?’

Normally this is not in the least what one would ask of the individual that one has just had amorous congress with for the first and very long-awaited time, or what one would want them to reply. Aziraphale, however, would have been considerably more alarmed if Crowley asked him if it was good, and indeed he had never loved anything so badly as he loved Crowley.[36] ‘Yes,’ he said dreamily. ‘Yes, it was very bad indeed.’

Crowley hummed in agreement, reaching out with his foot to hook over Aziraphale’s. He would have instantly reduced to quivering cinders any one who ventured any suggestion that he was at heart a soft and smitten fool who wanted to play footsie with his – well, _his,_ and that his six thousand years of being frustratingly unable to do any of this were about to boil over in all sorts of fascinating ways. But, as ever. It was a fair bet that he was very, very much a liar, and very, very much in love, and always had been.

Somewhere up in Heaven, God looked down, and squinted. She was not entirely sure that She could be seeing correctly, since She Almighty knew nothing _else_ had worked. But She was God, after all, and that came with some confidence that the Ineffable Plan would eventually, no matter how long and no matter where and no matter how, finally come to pass. Whether part of that centred on the angelic southern pansy and the demonic flash bastard sprawled out in bed above a bookshop in Soho is not for mortal ken, nor whether She knew that this marriage of Heaven and Hell would always keep Her little construction project with the Earth safe, no matter the bungling of a variety of insufferable underlings. But maybe we’ll find that all out when we die.[37]

God sat back. A smile crossed Her face.

Then God spoke, and She said:

“ABOUT  _TIME."_

**THE END.**

* * *

[1] _Fifty-Five Fahrenheit,_ for the Americans among us. This is generally considered pleasant summer weather in England.

[2] Crowley dutifully held back all his comments on _The Phantom of the Opera_ until the after-performance coffee in Covent Garden, whereupon he felt free to expostulate. Seeing Aziraphale looking somewhat deflated, however, he stopped quite swiftly. Crowley would immediately deny any suggestion that he could not stand to see Aziraphale upset in any capacity. It is left to the reader to judge whether he is in fact lying.

[3] ‘Nice’ here used in its more usual sense, and not that of our old chum Agnes Nutter.

[4] A further note for Americans: Katie Price is a television personality known primarily for being famous and engaging in a string of ill-considered relationships with progressively more dim-witted men. Along the way she has found time to pen a number of autobiographies about this, her plastic surgeries, and other riveting topics.

[5] Both celestial and infernal sides heartily disclaimed any responsibility for this. Even Crowley did not want to take the credit.

[6] He was an investment banker, he could afford it. Investment bankers, incidentally, are widely rumoured as one of the possible New Horsemen of the Apocalypse. One wonders if our coffee-spilling fiend was entirely what he seemed.

[7] He was fortunate, since they _could_ have been.

[8] The dignified suffering of undesirable events, weather-related or otherwise, is, as noted, a fundamental part of the British national character. It does raise the question of what all this says about Britain as a place to live in general, but still does not explain Boris Johnson.

[9] Somewhere, Rodney Garrigan woke up from his nap with a start, realised he had forgotten to ring the blokes with the satellites, and was immediately sacked by the Home Office.

[10] It is debatable whether she would have done any good there either, but the effort _was_ made.

[11] Certain eyes of Hell, however, might have liked it if he tried, however poorly. They were yellow, often concealed behind dark sunglasses, and belonged to an entity first known as Crawly.

[12] Including, unfortunately, a rather important message from his mother.

[13] It was also enough to chill other sorts of bones, if you take our meaning.

[14] There was a great deal riding on the question. Everything that was riding on it and had been since the Garden of Eden was enough to buckle any ordinary question.

[15] _Insouciance_ was in fact a word invented specifically to describe Crowley. It was the French in 1793, remarking on the particular nature of the strange man in dark glasses, who mysteriously rescued the crepes-craving poofter in the lace cravat they had planned to properly guillotine.

[16] Unfortunately, the Attaché had been assassinated earlier that morning. Nobody in the Russian Government knew anything about it. This was typical of the Kremlin, which is a good and benevolent political organisation where oversights can regrettably happen from time to time. Hail Putin.

[17] That Lord Byron. So very messy. He had, however, appreciated Crowley’s poetic suggestions, while not knowing that Crowley had cribbed half of them from Aziraphale. Anyone who knew Byron was not surprised by this liaison at all, and Crowley had been pining particularly hard just then and badly needed a distraction.

[18] Various well-connected persons had forwarded discreet enquiries as to whether either Heaven or Hell could help England win a major international football tournament. At this point, nobody was all that fussed about which. The answer was politely returned that even for almighty beings, this was impossible.

[19] This was, of course, not true. Nobody has ever gone to hell for anything that they did with their bits, at least not anything done with mutual consent. Those who skipped that part were another matter.

[20] The M25 was still cursed. Nobody had figured out a way to undo it, evidently, not even Adam. But instead of spelling out the sigil _Odegra_ in the language of the Great Priesthood of Ancient Mu, it now spelled _Oderga,_ which by this small but crucial semiotic alteration constantly gave motorists the unsettling sensation that a powerful and unseen entity had just farted in the back seat.

[21] This is another of the British national sports in which they take great pleasure. Conversely, it is among the more effective of low-level tortures in Hell.

[22] Far different from the Good Book Aziraphale was used to, and arguably far more consequential.

[23] The Dowlings had moved out of London. This was unfortunate, but on the other hand, it was probably a good thing not to have the US President anywhere near the Apocalypse, even indirectly.

[24] Let us say only that the notion of Good taking it up the arse had rarely been so literal.

[25] Though part of him was tempted to do so, if only to see if Crowley might push him up against a wall again.

[26] _YOU DON’T WASTE NO TIME AT ALL, DON’T HEAR THE BELL BUT YOU ANSWER THE CALL, IT COMES TO YOU AS IT COMES TO US ALL, YEAH, WE’RE JUST WAITING FOR THE HAMMER TO FALL._

[27] We are experts, after all. You can trust us upon this subject. They were even more surprised than that time you accidentally snogged your best mate at a house party while totally pissed on schnapps and woke up in horror without your pants.

[28] Tadfield was also rather changed by the now-lack of the Antichrist residing within its borders, and not entirely for the better. Its weather was no longer always perfect, a number of obnoxious new shopping centres and congested roundabouts had suddenly appeared, and a return train ticket to London now cost you the first year’s mortgage on a house. That, however, seemed to be happening everywhere.

[29] Or, well, originally vampire-slaying. Something of the sort, you know. Could be they weren’t fussed about also killing angels. The _New Aquarians_ that Anathema had given to Adam were also highly convinced of the role of the Templars in various world-controlling conspiracies, and it was probably a good thing he hadn’t got round to summoning any of those. Very hard to get rid of, Templars, like a particularly persistent foot fungus.

[30] Anathema, after all, knew something about Agnes’ frankness in this department.

[31] No less than forty-seven speed cameras had clocked Crowley along the way, and forty-seven Fixed Penalty Notices would mysteriously burst into flames in the letterbox after the postman delivered them in a few days’ time. The speed cameras would just have to go back to the vigilant business of punishing those hooligans doing thirty-five-point-two miles an hour in a thirty-five zone.

[32] Don’t say it, pervert. Chiefly because Aziraphale likely had no idea that one could.

[33] Provided, of course, that you were a Principality named Aziraphale. Anyone else might have been toasted and eaten with a nice bit of jam. Or at least ordered sternly to get on.

[34] Seriously, you monster. Go visit your nan. She’ll probably give you a nice cuppa and a Jammy Dodger and be delighted to hear about your life. Then you can escape up into the attic. Alternately, you can just log onto the Internet, which everyone apart from Aziraphale already does. The archangel Gabriel may understand very little else about humanity, but he did get the THANK YOU FOR MY PORNOGRAPHY bit right.

[35] And permanent demonic other things.

[36] Of course, Crowley would protest that he wasn’t _really_ bad, and you know what, we support him. But Aziraphale did love him very, very badly, and neither of them would have it any other way.

[37] We’ve got to find out something, really. Otherwise it might all seem like a bit of a waste, much like any visit to W.H. Smith.


End file.
